Myself in You
by Vampire-Badger
Summary: Desmond is always looking at Lucy. She doesn't like it much. Double agents shouldn't get too attached to the people around them, but sometimes those people make it hard. Set in ACII/Brotherhood.


There were times when Lucy would look up from her work and see Desmond looking at her, just looking, like she was the most important person in his world.

He liked to sit on the animus when his sessions were done for the day, and watch the others (Lucy) while they finished their work. The warehouse where they'd fled was a big place, with plenty of room- there were bedrooms, a kitchen, even an entire fucking floor set up specifically for Desmond to run and climb and practice the skills he'd learned from Ezio. But Desmond almost never left the workroom, choosing instead to spend all his time sitting on the animus like he was afraid to leave.

Sometimes Lucy hated him for that. They needed to know what he was learning, and how much of Ezio had imprinted onto Desmond. And he never did anything but sit on the damn chair, cross legged with his feet on the animus like the floor was lava, and the animus was the only thing solid enough to save him.

And always, _always_, he watched Lucy with eyes that said she was his anchor, the only one he trusted in this sudden disaster that his life was now. Lucy hadn't seen that look in anyone for years- decades, even. Not since the dog she'd had as a child, the one that used to follow her everywhere, sleeping at her feet and meeting her at the door whenever she came home.

When she was ten, the dog had been hit by a car and waited four hours in a misery of pain until a vet announced the damage was too extensive for him to survive, and they would have to put him down. The dog had watched her with exactly the same trust that was in Desmond's eyes now, right up until the vet came with the shot that would kill him.

(Merciful, they'd called it then. Humane.)

That had been Lucy's first betrayal. She still remembered the look in that dog's eyes as he realized she wasn't going to save him- devastated and confused, like he couldn't comprehend why she was hurting him instead of helping- even though she no longer remembered his name.

It made things easier, to compare Desmond to that dog in her mind, because it was only a matter of time until Vidic ordered her to bring him back, or the bleeding effect claimed him, and the illusion of freedom he was living in would vanish. Lucy had always known she would betray Desmond in the end. She tried to be matter of fact about that inevitability, but honestly she only hoped it wouldn't hurt too much.

One day, when Lucy found herself with some unexpected free time and no work to do, she crossed the room to Desmond's usual place on the animus. She'd been putting off asking him why he never left, but today she pasted a fake smile on her face and pretended it was only idle curiosity.

He took a long time to answer, gathering his thoughts and rubbing the back of his neck in obvious embarrassment. "I don't really do well with people," he admitted at last. "I've spent so much time on my own, I just… I don't know what to do here. You guys are all working so hard and I'm pretty much useless when I'm not in the animus. I don't want to get in the way, so… I figured it's better to stay over here. I can almost feel like I belong…" He laughed and smiled sheepishly up at her. "Stupid, right?"

And the unspoken message behind his words, as he looked at her with that same damn expression of blind trust, was that he hadn't felt like belonged, not anywhere, for a long time.

There were a lot of ways Lucy could have answered that, but in the end she shied away from anything important. "I thought you were a bartender before all this," she said. "Weren't you around people all the time?"

"Sure," Desmond said. "But that's not the same as having frie-" he stopped, and backtracked. "Nobody really knows the guy handing them drinks, you know?"

Lucy nodded, and bit back the impulse to tell him that no matter what he wanted or believed, they were not his friends. They were all using him, because he had the DNA they needed, because his ancestors (not him) were important. But she didn't. "Come on," she said instead. "Let's go downstairs- I want to see how well you've retained what you learned from Ezio."

Desmond didn't argue, just bowed his head and followed her downstairs. He never protested anything they told him to do anymore, not like he had at the beginning when it was just the two of them at Abstergo. Lucy knew that Rebecca and Shaun assumed it was because he'd accepted what he had to do, but Lucy wasn't sure. He looked a lot like someone that had already given up.

(He looked like he was trusting Lucy to get him through this, which was stupid and naïve of him but exactly what she needed him to believe.)

It was amazing to see the way Desmond changed, when she set him a task and let him go at it. When he ran, he looked truly alive for the first time. When he climbed, he grew confident. And when he jumped, he almost flew. Lucy watched him in silence, until finally he finished the course she'd set, and landed with a solid _thump_ on the ground in front of her. For an instant, as he fought to get his breathing back under control, he looked just like the assassin he was pretending to be. Then he looked up.

"How'd I do?" he asked, eager for her approval in a way that made Lucy want to sneer at him.

Pathetic.

"Great," she said. "You're learning a lot."

He beamed at her as they walked back up the stairs.

-/-

Lucy spent their first day in Monteriggioni scoping the area, gathering supplies, and (although she obviously kept this from her team members) having an impromptu meeting with an Abstergo handler that had been assigned to keep an eye on her. The man was a thoroughly unpleasant person, so that Lucy was in an extremely bad mood when she made it back to the abandoned villa late that night.

She stormed in, hoping the others would assume her bad mood was the result of their chaotic relocation (but too upset to care as much as she should), looked around, and snapped, "Where's Desmond?"

Shaun scowled. "Do we look like a couple of babysitters to you?" he snapped.

"Shaun!" Rebecca glared at him for a second, then sighed and turned to Lucy. There were bags under her eyes, and she obviously hadn't slept in a while. "He ran off somewhere as soon as we were done with the animus," she explained.

Lucy raised her eyebrows, and glanced at the empty animus nearby. She'd gotten so used to seeing Desmond there that the machine looked incomplete without him there. And, as much of an inconvenience as it was to have to track him down when what she really wanted to do was rest, Lucy couldn't deny that she was a little worried.

It took her nearly half an hour before she spotted Desmond crouched on a rooftop nearby, and longer than she would ever admit to climb up after him. "Hey," she called, when she was close enough to be sure no one else would hear her voice. "Desmond-"

But the man that turned around to look at her was not Desmond. This was a stranger, someone Lucy had never met, wearing Desmond's face like an ill-fitting mask. When he moved, he moved like Ezio, and when he looked at Lucy there was no recognition there. Lucy felt her heart nearly freeze at the sight of his unseeing gaze, his eyes fixed on some phantom that had been gone for centuries.

And then the moment passed, and Ezio melted back into Desmond, who blinked and looked around with a confusion that told Lucy plainly he had no idea how he'd gotten there. In the end his eyes fixed on Lucy, and for once she welcomed the old familiar look of unwavering trust on his face. "S- sorry," he said, stepping backward so quickly he almost fell off the side of the roof. Lucy moved forward to catch him as he flailed, and pulled him close to keep him from falling three stories to a messy and pointless death. "I don't know what happened, I don't remember-"

"It's okay," Lucy said.

"It's the bleeding effect, isn't it?" he asked.

Lucy couldn't (wouldn't) lie to him, but the look on his face as he nodded made her wish she had.

"I knew it," he said. "As soon as I saw where we're staying, I looked around and I saw everything the way Ezio did. And I can't stop, Lucy, I can't-"

She shushed him and pulled him in close. Her training told her it was because she was supposed to make him trust her, rely on her as much as possible. But in reality she couldn't stand hearing the trace of Italian creeping into his voice the longer he went on talking. Desmond shut up, as she'd known he would, but she could feel him trembling in her arms.

The shaking never really stopped. Even in the days and weeks that followed, Desmond never really seemed to calm down again. He spent his days in the animus, muscles twitching and trembling in ways they never used to before Monteriggioni. After, he slipped away without a word to the others, shaking with some unspoken emotion that no one wanted to ask after. The only time Lucy ever saw him calm was when the bleeding effect overwhelmed him completely, and his mind belonged to one of his ancestors. But that was worse, because that meant he was so much farther gone than he should have been by then.

(Weak, Lucy told herself whenever she saw Desmond disappear behind the layers of dead men, but she couldn't quite believe it.)

She came to miss the needy, trusting look she always used to see in his eyes when he looked at her. At least then he had known who she was. More than once, she caught herself gazing absentmindedly at the empty animus where Desmond no longer sat after sessions. He was never around anymore. Instead, he spent hours and hours climbing the old buildings and free running through the streets. And that was good, because it meant she didn't have to see that look in his eyes anymore. She didn't care what Desmond thought about her, not really. He was just a tool to be used, and then thrown away when his mind was too broken to hold up any longer. Maybe this way, if Desmond was already gone- buried under the memories of dead men- she wouldn't have to see that look of betrayal in his eyes when the day came for him to finally find out who (what) she was.

-/-

But in the end, it wasn't like that at all.

Coming She could feel the blade buried in her stomach, and the blood spilling from the wound with every beat of her heart. And worse, she could feel that same look of horrified betrayal growing across her own face as she looked up at Desmond. For the first time in weeks, he seemed completely sane. There was no trace of his ancestors on his face or in the way he moved, and his hands didn't shake at all. Lucy tried to speak, but couldn't- she had never once believed that Desmond (Desmond, who trusted her over everyone else in his life, who depended on her, who looked at her like she meant the world to him) could kill her like this.

She looked up and, through the spreading darkness that her vision had become, saw the certainty in Desmond's eyes. Somehow, he knew. He knew that she had always meant to betray him, to use him however she needed and then discard him. And he had killed her first.

And all Lucy could think was that this wasn't how it was supposed to go. She had pictured her last moments with Desmond a thousand different times, and always their positions had been reversed. He should have been the one looking at her with helpless confusion but instead it was Lucy, knowing her life was about to end and not knowing why.

And then Desmond- who had remained impassive through all this- smiled. It wasn't a smug smile, or a particularly happy one. It was a smile of acceptance, serene and confident in a way Lucy was not used to seeing. He knew everything (somehow) and he had accepted it. "I'm sorry," he said, so quietly Lucy knew she was the only one that could hear. "I always thought you were the best of us…"

And that was when he fell, like a puppet whose strings had been suddenly cut, onto the ground next to Lucy, still gripping the Apple tightly in one hand. Their faces were only inches apart, and all Lucy could see were Desmond's blank, staring eyes looking at her, and her own reflection in the pupils. Or maybe that was just her imagination, a last projection of her fading mind as she died. But as Lucy stared at her pale reflection, she realized that Desmond had _always _seen her as better than she was, and that even as he'd stabbed her, there had been no anger or accusation in his eyes.

Lucy's last thought was that she wished she could have seen herself the way Desmond did, just for a minute. And then, she died.


End file.
